On the very few fronts that I can relate to Woody Allen there’s one especially fortified one. And it’s the cinema experience.
As Alvy quips in Annie Hall after arriving two minutes late to a Bergman film, “I've got to see a picture exactly from start to finish, because I'm anal.” He subsequently offers to see a four hour documentary on Nazis.
I’m sort of like that. Well, no. I’m exactly like that. Anything from Schindler’s List to That-Katherine-Heigl-Film-You’re-Forced-Into, I have to see from its incipient moments to the point where the theatre employees are shoving me out with a broom. No late arrivals. No early departures. And especially no interruptions.
Frankly there’s a great deal of hurdles to surmount living life with such a complex.
Primarily there’s the matter of mobile phones in theatres.
Once in a while I’ll spot someone rummaging through a bag and suddenly the Lighthouse of Alexandria will be beaming directly into my eyeballs. Even worse- sending some dire text will likely follow (lol can’t talk in a movie ttyl or whatever). At this point all the glaring I can muster cannot adequately embody my frustration at being distracted from Tilda Swinton’s giant glowing face in We Need to Talk About How I Am Going to Throw Your Phone into the Ocean.
There is a place for phones and it is not the movie theatre.
There’s also food and drink. I understand the fact that munchies are keen to strike in a cinematic environment but please god is that unicorn blood in your cup because I can hear in great and excruciating detail your attempts to capture ever last drop of liquid through that straw.
Like that sound that people make when they move their straws through the plastic lid to their drinks as if it’ll cause more liquid to spontaneously appear that goes sort of like erghhhh-aughhhh-erghhhh-aughhhh-erghhhh-aughhhh.
I’m not a fan.
But good lord the holy grail of all pet peeves here is definitely that one token person who will always, always not understand any plot element whatsoever and ask for a detailed explanation of every scene from other theatregoers in a harsh yell-whisper. This same person will also often voice surprise at painfully no-shit-sherlock plot elements as if s/he deserves a little gold star and a pat on the back for finally understanding something.
However, although most of my movie interruptions are someone else’s fault, there’s one that’s not. In fact, one of the largest catastrophes of my life as a cinephile is always an ill-timed bladder matter.
A week ago I was sitting in the Gene Siskel Film Center watching a Cold War Lithuania film surrounded by what was likely a crowd of Lithuanian expats and people seeking refuge from the St. Paddy’s festivities causing city-wide chaos outdoors. Then, tragedy struck. I needed to pee.
At this point there were two courses of action: clench my thighs together and hope for the best, or wade through a crowd of theatre-goers and accept a discontinuity in the film viewing process.
After a good 10-15 minutes of strenuous clenching I came to the conclusion that I was missing even more of the film calculating how long I could hold out for instead of actually leaving, so I clambered over the rest of the aisle and jog-walked to the WC. I watched the rest of the film leaning against the exit.
But aside from having to pee I can always blame interruptions on someone else. If you disrupt my voyage into the fruitful gardens of my moviegoing experience chances are we can’t be friends. Or I’ll want to kill you. Or maybe both.
